BCI Shipment Ready – But Stuck in Limbo..

Until a few hours ago, we were gearing up to offer a handful of the BCI Fantasy Swords in the last few days before Christmas..

Shipping the swords from the Philippines is, however, extremely expensive. In the past, we shipped some in by airfreight – and the average shipping price worked out to be over $120 per sword – which we need to factor in the final price – basically paying for nothing.. (and then you have shipping again from the warehouse to final location).

The usual way sword companies avoid such high prices is to bring in a container load of swords, but as this is a ’boutique’ forge, not a factory churning out dozens or hundreds of swords a day, seafreight is out of the question..

So this time, we came up with a different plan based on the Forge Direct model – and that’s to pack and ship the swords direct to the customer from the forge to anywhere in the world. It was all ready to go, and we were just about to offer this up when a huge spanner came out of the ether and has scuppered all our plans and sent us back to the drawing board..

The cost of sending a sword internationally by post is typically around $60 to $100 – and that’s what I was expecting and factored into the price. So when I just got the final quote – and the shipping cost per sword direct from the forge is a few dollars of $200..

…That blew us right out of the water, and the swords that are ready to go out are stuck in limbo..

Some of the Swords that aren’t going anywhere anytime soon

Much of these costs come from the so called ‘TRAIN’ law and tax, which brings the cost of shipping well above the international average.

As such we are left with two choices – either increase the price to cover the costs or put this swords into storage and invest in a large enough shipment to bring the average cost down to less than $100 per sword..

A real shame, as I was looking forward this launching – and its all been scrapped at the last minute..

At least though, the next post will be more positive as its time for the next installment of the webcomic..